Learning How to Die

There is no place on earth where death cannot find us—even if we constantly twist our heads about in all directions as in a dubious and suspect land…if there were any way of sheltering from death’s blows—I am not the man to recoil from it…but it is madness to think that you can succeed.

Men come and they go and they trot and they dance, and never a word about death. All well and good. Yet when death does come—to them, their wives, their children, their friends—catching them unawares and unprepared, then what storms of passion overwhelm them, what cries, what fury, what despair!

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death…we do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.